And it came to pass, that when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth.
Every writer’s nightmare, that, and a few verses later every tyrant’s nightmare:
27 ¶Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, after that the king had burned the roll, and the words which Baruch wrote at the mouth of Jeremiah, saying,
28 Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned.
29 And thou shalt say to Jehoiakim king of Judah, Thus saith the Lord; Thou hast burned this roll, saying, Why hast thou written therein, saying, The king of Babylon shall certainly come and destroy this land, and shall cause to cease from thence man and beast?
30 Therefore thus saith the Lord of Jehoiakim king of Judah; He shall have none to sit upon the throne of David: and his dead body shall be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost.
31 And I will punish him and his seed and his servants for their iniquity; and I will bring upon them, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and upon the men of Judah, all the evil that I have pronounced against them; but they hearkened not.
Toward the end of chapter 13 of Who Wrote the Bible? Richard Elliott Friedman quotes an ancient tradition, recorded in the Fourth Book of (ca. 100 AD) that the same thing happened to the original Torah scroll, burned with other Bible books “in the fire that destroyed the temple in 587 B.C.,” but “Ezra was able to restore it by a revelation” (224).
That resonates nicely with Joseph Smith’s translation a fragment of parchment, hidden up long perished, but seen in a vision (D&C 7). But it may not resonate for people who don’t have a tradition that scripture can be lost and restored.
I’ve puzzled for years over why other Christians so strenuously reject the idea of restored scripture. Going on 40, since hearing comments like these on my mission: “Do you really think Jehovah God Almighty would let that happen to his holy words?” “I could accept that [2 Nephi 29] if it was in here [the Bible];” “God knew what books were going to be in the Bible a long time before it was compiled. He knew Revelation would be the last book and knew how it ended, so the last words of the book apply to the whole Bible.”
While thinking about this column I asked the question out loud, “Why do others resist the idea of new revelation so fiercely?” And almost immediately this thought, “Maybe they think it’s nihilistic.”
Not an answer I would have expected. “Wherefore murmur ye, because that ye shall receive more of my word?” (II Ne.29:8) Nihilism is reduction to nothing, not addition. I was thinking about this last week while pedaling furiously to the bus stop in American Fork before the bus got to the freeway off-ramp, and I started thinking about the word canon, which means measuring rod, and I imagined someone saying to me, “How can we hold to the rod if it’s always changing?”
It’s a seductive argument, a compelling image. You could build a sermon around that about the rod expanding in girth so your fingers can’t close around it, even those fingers that are thicker than our fathers’ loins. Quick, find a counter-example.
“It’s not the length of the rod that matters, it’s the comparative function. The units of measure don’t change between a 12-inch rule [not ruler, per Andy Baggs, Sixth grade homeroom and shop teacher] and a 36-inch yardstick. Truth cleaveth unto truth.
But let’s approach it from a different perspective. It occurred to me sometime in about the last year that the Mormon idea that the Atonement took place in the Garden and not on the cross has a lot to commend and recommend it.
If the Atonement happens on the cross it’s something done to Jesus, done with his consent, but not something he does. If the Atonement takes place in Gethsemane, while Jesus is alone, it’s something he takes upon himself.
But we don’t make a hard and fast distinction. In large part Calvary and Gethsemane are interchangeable images of atonement. Thus in sacrament meeting yesterday we sang,
Upon the cross of Calvary
They Crucified our Lord
And sealed with blood the sacrifice
That sanctified his word.
It would be at home in a Protestant hymn book. You can see it as a conventional Christian sentiment– but there are also overtones of D&C 135:1 “To seal the testimony of this book and the Book of Mormon, we announce the martyrdom of Joseph Smith the Prophet, and Hyrum Smith the Patriarch,” 3, “and like most of the Lord’s anointed in ancient times, has sealed his mission and his works with his own blood,” 7, “and their innocent blood on the floor of Carthage jail is a broad seal affixed to ‘Mormonism’ that cannot be rejected by any court on earth.” These overtones might suggest that the sacrifice had already been made, and the cross put sealed or ratified to the sacrifice.
You can also see this verse as an ironic statement, the crucifiers thought they were getting rid of Jesus, but they were really sealing his sacrifice–the testator’s death simply put the testament into force (D&C 135:5).
And my sacrament meditation doesn’t exhaust the contrasting meanings and overtones of the hymn.
The idea that truth comes from the clash of opposites is built into scripture in ways we don’t usually think of. We quote the Lord’s words to Oliver Cowdery in D&C 9 to the effect that we have to study a problem out in our mind and make a choice before the Lord will tell us yea or nay, but where did Oliver get the idea that the Lord would just give him the translation? When Joseph was dictating the Book of Mormon translation would Oliver have heard him study the problem out? Probably not, if what we’ve been told about the speed of translation is accurate.
I read somewhere that Jesus chooses “other seventy” (Luke 10:1) to send out because if you count the names of the families coming off the ark in Genesis 10 there are seventy, so Jesus’ choice of the other seventy represents sending the gospel to all the earth.
Robert Alter says, in The Five Books of Moses, “the Table of Nations is a serious attempt, unprecedented it the ancient Near East, to sketch a panorama of all known human cultures” (54). But the next story suggests an alternative explanation of cultures, which “might reflect a characteristically biblical way of playing dialectically with possibilities: humankind is many and divided, and a consequence of natural history; and, alternately, humankind was once one, as a consequence of having been made by the same Creator, but this God-given onenenss was lost through man’s presumption in trying to overreach his place in the divine scheme” (57).
Jim Faulconer said it a little differently in class one day: The scriptures are set up such that you can’t be dogmatic. If you push very far in one direction you find an opposite pushing back.
Hence, we see these two questions pushing back against each other. Are we saved by grace? Yes, but grace without works is dead. Are our works important? Yes, as important as filthy rags.
Friedman approaches the the dialectical nature of the Bible from a different viewpoint. J was from the Judah, E from Israel, writing to substantiate the claims of their respective kingdoms by placing the sacred stories on their territory. The Priestly writer, an Aaronid bent on establishing Aaron’s descendants as the only legitimate priests,was writng an alternate history to the combined JE. The Deuteronomist, a Shilonite (and maybe a Mushite, for Aaron was not Levi’s only son), called P’s Torah a lying Torah.
After the return from Babylon, along comes the Redactor and combines them–also an Aaronid priest, but where P sought to divide R sought to unite and reconcile the opposites, greatly expanding the interpretive possibilities.
The last third of Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is an extended account of the schisms in the early Church–the struggles between Paul and Peter and James. He says Paul won, but it’s also possible that the editors of the New Testament were trying, with their inclusion of the non-Pauline writings, to reconcile opposing factions or doctrines.
One implication of the interplay of competing viewpoints in scripture is that there is no final interpretation.
Because of the way the buses run after 6 PM I get off the Frontrunner train in American Fork and pedal over to the library to wait for the next bus. I could pedal all the way home and be about 10 minutes ahead of the bus, but I like libraries. On Fridays the library closes at 6, so I pedal over to Deseret Industries. This past Friday a storm was icumen in and I debated whether just to hurry home. “No, I’ll go to DI.”
And what did I find there? Yes, a book whose title I had been trying to remember as illustrative of a certain attitude towards scripture: God’s Word, Final, Infallible and Forever, oh, and I had forgotten, it’s by Floyd McElveen, author of the classic polemic Will the Saints Go Marching In?
For the Saints, God’s word may be infallible, but the Words people write down when God says, “write the vision” are not, certainly not final, though they can be forever re-revealed. I’ll talk more next month about why I think such continuing visioning and revisioning can feel nihilistic, indeed, might even feel threatening to the Saints.
In the meantime I’d like to hear what you have to say about the connection between revelation and nihilism.
It’s a problem, isn’t it? If we’re too rigid in our interpretations, we risk substituting our own understanding for whatever truth God is intent on teaching us, which (by definition) are meant to lead us somewhere we had not previously imagined. On the other hand, if we’re too open to multiple interpretations, we run the risk of letting ourselves of the hook in terms of actually letting the Word of God make us uncomfortable with our lives, which it’s clearly also meant to do.
I remember a saying encountered during my youth: “The problem with being too open-minded is that everything falls out.” Glib, sharp, uncharitable, but nonetheless with perhaps an edge of truth.
But if we are not open-minded, we can’t follow the injunction at the end of the 13th Article of Faith. We have to be open to everything and anything that is virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, and we have to be on the look-out for these things because they will not always be found inside our comfort zones. We really do have to look outside the boxes of our own understandings.
Being open-minded also allows everything to fall in. Then we apply the gift of the Holy Ghost to learn what we should retain and incorporate into our lives.